According to this fluff piece in the Times.
What's a poor citizen to do?
Every single UK broadband subscriber will be taxed / fined an extra £25 per year, to prop up the film and music industry.
Nice work if you can get it.
Why not subsidise the fax industry as well, and the cassette tape industry, and while we are at it, how about the buggy whip manufacturing industry?
Business has a thing called "externalisation", what it boils down to is putting as much cost as possible outside the business, a classic example is a textile mill that externalises the cost of polluting, simply by dumping the pollutants into the local river. Someone else, downstream, can pick up the tab.
The justification for this is that allegedly the latest Star Trek movie was downloaded 11 million times in 2009.
Around 150 million visits to the cinema per year happen in the UK, if you take the alleged 11 million star treks, add in the harry potters, avatars (holds hand up) etc etc it is no stretch of the imagination to claim that 150 million movie downloads happened in the UK in 2009.
According to this metric, and the false logic employed, if downloading was banned, cinema attendances would double.
Bullshit.
Here is why;
1. There is the false logic assumption that if I had not downloaded Avatar, I would have gone to the cinema and paid to see it. This is utterly false. You would have to pay me at least £5 to set foot in a cinema, to compensate me for the travel, mobile phones, noisy bastards, no smoking or drinking, inability to pause, crap seats, etc etc.
2. There is the false logic assumption that people like me with 46 1080p screens who prefer the comforts of our own homes would substitute the video rental shop for the cinema. Rubbish. The video rental shops don't have anything new, or anything good, or much choice of anything, and quite apart from that I have no interest in watching a Blu-ray that does not let me skip past 15 minutes of promo crap.
3. There is a false logic assumption that the media in question (whether it is cinema or rental) is value for money, I am simply not prepared to pay £5 per head for a cinema ticket, or £5 a night for a DVD, for 90 minutes of "entertainment" It is just way too expensive.
4. There is a false logic assumption, in short, that the 11 million downloads of Star Trek represent even 1 single lost cinema sale or DVD rental... You are reading this because it is free, would you pay £5 to read it? Stupid question. Would you pay £0.01 to read it? Stupid question.
5. There is a false logic assumption that the decline in cinema attendance figures, record sales, etc, say compared to 1970, is due to a change in people's attitudes, we have suddenly become a nation of thieves. Simply not true. These EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS were made about the compact audio cassette.
6. There is a false logic assumption that it is acceptable to impose a fine / tax / tariff on EVERYONE, that would be like mandating that I must buy a television licence, even though I haven't watched television for 20 years.
7. There is a false logic assumption that the technologies that they are going to deploy are actually going to catch people illegally sharing copyright material, ONLY, and NO-ONE ELSE, and indeed this is implicitly acknowledged in the desire to fine / tax / tariff ALL users of broadband, irrespective of what they do.
8. There is a false logic assumption that we are dealing with a static target, the ever evolving technology means that it really does not matter what methods you use to counter copyright violations (NOT copyright theft, no one is stealing your actual copyright, and no one is depriving anyone else of their use) because within the month (and I am being generous) they will be cracked.
9. There is a false logic assumption that the alternative they provide is as good as, or better than, the pirated version. The BBC HD channel just cut it's bitrate from 16 mbit/sec to 9.7 mbit/sec, and everyone is up in arms, and the BBC HD bitrate is the highest of the lot.
IN short, the whole thing is a dirty lie from start to finish, The Digital Economy Bill is in fact nothing more than an attempt to extort money from the law abiding citizens of this country, so that the media industry can externalise the costs of being a bunch of increasingly irrelevant and out of touch, crap producing assholes.
Who is this Bill proposed by?
None other than Peter Mandelson, again.
Nobody voted for this prick.
WRITE (do not email, they ignore it, write on paper and post it) to your MP now, and tell them in no uncertain terms, "unless you throw this Bill out, neither you personally, nor your party, will ever get my vote again."
